The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Berkut did not want to be interviewed. Masha would not leave. By three in the morning they started talking. By five, Masha had what she had come for: she felt she understood. Berkut officers thought they were there to protect the peace. They were convinced that the

protesters were a handful of troublemakers. They were not particularly devoted to Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, but they believed in order and strong power. A real leader would never have let riffraff burn tires in the capital's central square. This sort of thing would never happen in Russia, for example. They even mentioned Bolotnaya. Masha tried to tell them that Bolotnaya had been nothing like the Maidan. They said that was a good thing. She was not so sure. But she was certain that whatever was happening here in Kiev would end differently from the protests in Moscow.

"Ukraine is some sort of parallel-reality Russia," she wrote in the conclusion to her dispatch. "Everything is completely different there."⁹ TV Rain's online magazine, Slon, published the article as submitted: none of the editors objected to referring to Ukraine as a sort of alternative Russia.

masha was the only Russian to have interviewed Berkut. She came back to Moscow a real journalist.

A day after she returned, Masha cursed out loud when she was reading Twitter. Then she made a screenshot and sent it to TV Rain's web editor with a question: "WTF?"

The tweet originated with TV Rain. It said, "Should Leningrad have been surrendered to the Germans if that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives?"

It was the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Siege of Leningrad. The siege had lasted 872 days and claimed over a million lives. Masha had been around long enough to know how much trouble this tweet could cause: she had seen battles to the death break out in the Russian blogosphere over less. She knew that no question about Soviet conduct in the Second World War ever went unpunished—and this was a question that suggested that the country's greatest and most mythologized sacrifice in that war could and should have been avoided. She also knew that the new social media manager at TV Rain was in his late teens and that he was about to learn one of the hardest lessons of his life.

The tweet was live for all of eight minutes—the time it took for the channel's web editor to come out of the shower at the gym where he happened to be, open his locker, see outraged and worried messages from Masha and countless others, and delete the tweet. It was too late. The firestorm had begun. In the next few days, the St. Petersburg city legislature called for the channel to be shut down. A federal deputy prime minister publicly backed the demand.¹⁰ Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, declared war on the channel:

I want audience reaction to be absolutely merciless here. Because the moment we start becoming even the least bit tolerant of such surveys, our nation will begin to erode, our memory will erode, the genetic memory of our people. I am certain that other countries would give an even harder time to a channel that crossed this kind

of moral and ethical red line.¹¹

When Masha came to work, she was greeted by members of the youth group Nashi, who were picketing TV Rain. They had brought plastic bags filled with excrement, to spread in the channel's courtyard and to toss at the occasional employee.

Less than two weeks later, all the channel's satellite carriers had dropped it and most of its advertisers had canceled their contracts. The channel's director general, who together with her husband owned TV Rain, called a staff meeting. She announced that there would be layoffs and that those who kept their jobs would have to take a 30 percent pay cut. Masha did a quick mental calculation. She could barely make ends meet as it was—a 30 percent pay cut would mean she had to find another job to supplement the income from the journalism that she had originally entered in order to survive as a political defendant. She decided to quit—by leaving on her own, she could at least make the editor in chief's job a little bit easier. The director general was still talking.

"With all that's been going on, I haven't seen my children at all," she said. "So, starting tomorrow, I'll take a short vacation—we had long planned a ski holiday in the Swiss Alps, and this will dovetail nicely with Davos."